‘It’s the not knowing,’ a tiny, refined-looking woman had said, at that homicide victims support group she and Ed had gone to a few times, sitting on fold-out chairs in that cold community hall somewhere in Chatswood, holding their styrofoam cups of instant coffee in shaky hands. The woman’s son had been murdered on his way home from cricket practice. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had seen anything. ‘The not f**king knowing,’ she said.

There was a ripple of soft blinks around the circle. The woman had a sweet, cut-glass voice; it was like hearing the Queen swear.

‘Hate to tell you this, love, but knowing doesn’t help all that much,’ interrupted a stocky red-faced man whose daughter’s murderer had been sentenced to life in prison.

Rachel and Ed had both taken a mutual, violent dislike to the red-faced man, and they’d stopped going to the support group because of him.

People thought that tragedy made you wise, that it automatically elevated you to a higher, spiritual level, but it seemed to Rachel that just the opposite was true. Tragedy made you petty and spiteful. It didn’t give you any great knowledge or insight. She didn’t understand a damned thing about life except that it was arbitrary and cruel, and some people got away with murder, while others made one tiny careless mistake and paid a terrible price.

She held a face washer under the cold tap, folded it and placed it across her forehead as if she was a patient with a fever.

Seven minutes. Her mistake could be measured in minutes.

Marla was the only person who knew. Ed never knew.

Janie had been complaining that she was tired all the time. ‘Do more exercise,’ Rachel kept telling her. ‘Don’t go to bed so late. Eat more!’ She was so skinny and tall. And then she’d started complaining about some vague pain in her lower back. ‘Mum, I seriously think I’ve got glandular fever.’ Rachel had made the appointment with Dr Buckley just so she could tell Janie there was nothing wrong with her and she needed to do all the things that her mother told her.

Janie normally caught the bus and walked home from the Wycombe Road bus stop. The plan was that Rachel would pick her up from the corner down from the high school and take her straight to Dr Buckley’s surgery in Gordon. She’d reminded Janie of the plan that morning.

Except Rachel was seven minutes late, and when she got to the corner, Janie wasn’t waiting. She’d forgotten, Rachel thought, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. Or she’d got sick of waiting. The child was so impatient, acting as if Rachel was a convenient form of public transport with an obligation to run to schedule. There were no mobile phones in those days. There wasn’t anything Rachel could do, except wait in the car for another ten minutes (she didn’t actually like waiting much herself) before finally going home and ringing Dr Buckley’s receptionist to cancel the appointment.

She wasn’t worried. She was aggravated. Rachel knew there was nothing particularly wrong with Janie. It was typical that Rachel would go to the trouble of making the doctor’s appointment and then Janie wouldn’t bother. It wasn’t until much later, when Rob said, his mouth full of sandwich, ‘Where’s Janie?’ that Rachel looked up at the kitchen clock and felt that first icy thread of fear.

Nobody saw Janie waiting on the corner, or if they did they never came forward. Rachel never knew what difference those seven minutes had made.

What she did eventually learn from the police investigation was that Janie turned up at Connor Whitby’s house at something like three-thirty, and they watched a video together (Nine to Five with Dolly Parton), before Janie said she had something to do in Chatswood and Connor walked her to the railway station. Nobody else ever saw her alive. Nobody remembered seeing her on the train, or anywhere in Chatswood.

Her body was found the next morning by two nine-year-old boys who were riding their BMX bikes through the Wattle Valley Park. They stopped at the playground and found her lying at the bottom of the slide. She had her school blazer placed over her like a blanket, as if to keep her warm, and a pair of rosary beads in her hands. She’d been strangled. ‘Traumatic asphyxiation’ was the cause of death. No signs of a struggle. Nothing to scrape from her fingernails. No usable fingerprints. No hairs. No DNA; Rachel asked the question when she read about cases being solved through DNA testing in the late nineties. No suspects.

‘But where was she going?’ Ed kept asking, as if Rachel would finally remember the answer if he asked the question often enough. ‘Why was she walking through that park?’

Sometimes, after he’d asked her over and over, he’d end up sobbing with rage and frustration. Rachel couldn’t bear it. She wanted nothing to do with his grief. She didn’t want to know about it, or feel it, or share it. Hers was bad enough. How could she cope with carrying his as well?

She wondered now why they couldn’t turn to each other to share their grief. She knew they’d loved each other, but when Janie died, neither of them had been able to bear the sight of each other’s tears. They’d held on to each other the way strangers do in a natural disaster, their bodies stiff, awkwardly patting shoulders. And poor little Rob was caught in the middle, a teenage boy clumsily trying to make everything right, all false smiles and cheery lies. No wonder he became a real estate agent.

The water was too cold now.

Rachel began to shiver uncontrollably, as if she had hypothermia. She put her hands on the sides of the bath and went to stand up.

She couldn’t do it. She was stuck in here for the night. Her arms, her dead-white stick-like arms, had no strength in them. How was it possible that this useless, frail, blue-veined body was the same one that had once been so brown, firm and strong?

‘That’s a good tan for April,’ Toby Murphy had said to her that day. ‘Sunbake, do you, Rachel?’

That’s why she was seven minutes late. She was flirting with Toby Murphy. Toby was married to her friend Jackie. He was a plumber and needed an office assistant. Rachel had gone for an interview and she stayed in Toby’s office for over an hour, flirting. Toby was an incorrigible flirt, and she was wearing the new dress that Marla had convinced her to buy, and Toby kept looking at her bare legs. Rachel would never have been unfaithful to Ed, and Toby adored his wife, so everyone’s marriage vows were safe, but still, he was looking at her legs and she liked it.

Ed wouldn’t have been happy if she’d got the job with Toby. He didn’t know about the interview. Rachel sensed he felt competitive towards Toby, something to do with Toby being a tradie and Ed being a less masculine pharmaceutical salesman. Ed and Toby played tennis together and Ed generally lost. He pretended it didn’t matter but Rachel could tell that it always rankled.